According to Baudelaire, the devil's best trick was to
convince us that he doesn't exist. But for Joris-Karl Huysmans,
though he doubted the existence of God, belief in the devil was never a
problem. For him the devil may not have been omnipresent, but he was
certainly ubiquitous. Almost to his dying day, Huysmans shielded himself
against the Prince of Darkness with amulets, votive statues, and
talismans of all sorts. His bachelor apartment reeked with the fumes of
holy tapers, left burning all night to discourage succubi and
"ecclesiastical larvae" (presumably the ghosts of defrocked
priests). Even garish ecclesiastical furnishings, all the vulgar
paraphernalia of late-nineteenth-century French Catholicism, struck him
as mischievous interventions of the Lord of the Flies. And yet, faith in
the devil led him, by slow and torturous routes, to a fervent piety. The
irony was not lost on him. "With his hooked paw the devil drew me
to God" he noted late in life.

There is an astonishing photograph of this fitful Satanist amid a
throng of pilgrims at the Grotto of Lourdes. Taken in September 1904, it
shows Huysmans wedged in with other rapt devotees before the basilica.
With his neatly trimmed goatee, close-cropped skull, and impeccable
frock-coat, he cuts a strangely stylish figure in the crowd. In other
photographs taken at Lourdes, he has a sleek look, his delicate features
giving him the unexpected aspect, amid the blurred hordes, of an elegant
ferret. The sometime dandy and the lifelong bureaucrat have coalesced in
his respectful but jaunty stance. A career functionary at the Ministry
of the Interior by day, novelist and feuilletonist on evenings and
weekends, as well as president of the newly formed Academie Goncourt,
Huysmans juggled more guises, as well as poses, than any other literary
figure of his day. In the end, through the unforeseeable machinations of
grace, these jostling selves fused. Without abandoning either his wit or
his clearsightedness, Huysmans ended up the most convinced of Catholics.
And his faith was accompanied by a deepening exercise of all the stolid
virtues which previously he had ridiculed. If "humility is
endless" as T. S. Eliot declared, the once arrogant Huysmans
explored its furthest boundaries in his final agonies. It took years,
and it took stubborn patience, before he grew into goodness. At the end
he could offer up the protracted sufferings of his hideous death as an
act of "mystical substitution" refusing morphine so that his
agonies might serve to redeem others, all unknown to him. The
substitution demanded anonymity, perhaps the utmost limit of humility.

An assiduous reader of hagiographical books--the more lurid the
better--Huysmans himself slowly developed into an exemplum. Though the
story of his life, and of his creeping, almost inconspicuous
transformation, rivals that of other more celebrated figures--St.
Augustine comes to mind--the Church has not clasped Huysmans to her
bosom, but has handled him, and his case, with squeamish tongs. And yet,
for all the brilliance of his fiction and criticism, Huysmans' life
was his own most bizarre, and moving, creation.

In 1955, the Oxford scholar Robert Baldick published the definitive
biography of this odd genius and his account has now, at long last, been
re-issued in an affordable paperback. (1) I first read The Life of J.-K
Huysmans over thirty years ago and thought it a masterpiece, able to
hold its own with Painter's Proust or Ellmann's Joyce; on a
rereading, it seems to me even better than I had remembered. This is not
solely because Baldick writes very well; though he loved Huysmans and
had read almost every word, published or unpublished, which he wrote, he
eschewed the master's baroque prose in favor of a swift, clear,
graceful style. He interviewed the novelist's few surviving friends
and relatives; he ransacked archives and obscure repositories; he
carried out bibliographic sleuthing with admirable doggedness. In his
research he uncovered many previously unknown or unsuspected facts which
illumined Huysmans's literary career as well as his intricate
spiritual life.

But mastery of the subject and expository skill do not alone make
an outstanding biography. Baldick possessed two further gifts which come
brilliantly into play in his Life. He had an uncanny feeling for the
taste and smell and feel of late-nineteenth-century French literary and
cultural life; as we read him, we seem to rub up against the very
texture of the time. And he was a gifted storyteller. These abilities
enabled him to create unforgettable vignettes of any number of noble and
eccentric and downright dotty characters who flitted through
Huysmans's life. These include totally forgotten figures, such as
Mme. Enguerrand de Marigny, an aristocratic widow who served as
Huysmans' charwoman and who not only relished her late
husband's descent from one of Philip the Fair's ministers who
had hanged himself, but "would sometimes re-enact his suicide in
gruesome detail, in a misguided attempt to amuse her employer."
Another was a fanatic Latinist and advocate of Gregorian Chant, the
elderly and irascible Anguste Dessus, whose cartes de visite identified
him, in Latin translation, as "A. Super" and who once hectored
the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris "into visiting the dying Abbe
Raillard, a neglected Gregorianist, and afterwards showed him to his
carriage with the final admonition: 'Your Eminence, extra
Gregorianum, nulla salus!'"

Of course, more illustrious figures dominate the narrative, from
the impecunious and quixotic Villiers de l'IsleAdam to the
loathsome Leon Bloy--with Flaubert, de Maupassant, Verlaine, Mallarme,
and Zola making brief but trenchant appearances--and Baldick has some
wonderful anecdotes to tell about them. Thus, when the absinthe-sodden
Verlaine asked Huysmans for money to buy new clothes, Huysmans shrewdly
insisted on accompanying the poet to the tailor. There Verlaine would
settle for nothing less than a suit of corduroy velvet, declaring,
"I should like to look like a carpenter because carpenters are the
most magnificent exemplars of human beauty! I want a jacket in ribbed
velvet, and baggy trousers with that little pocket for the yellow
yardstick--and if I can't have what I want, I swear I shan't
wear any clothes at all, but go stark naked like John the Baptist!"
Huysmans stood firm and the raving poet left the shop more sensibly
attired. On other occasions, Verlaine would fall into despondency and
send Huysmans scribbled notes at the Ministry of the Interior, begging
for help. As Baldick puts it, "With a sigh, Huysmans would tidy
away his papers and hurry out to the cafe, where an ugly, sinister
figure sat hunched over a table, sobbing like a child, and waiting to be
comforted." (These are but two instances of innumerable acts of
kindness on Huysmans's part to friends and hangers-on throughout
his life and form a counterpoise to his outbursts of misanthropic rage.)
It is to Baldick's great credit, however, that he never allows
these more famous figures to skew his narrative. The shady defrocked
priest, long forgotten, is as sharply drawn as the literary lion, and
the liveliness of the narrative springs in part from this fine justice
of regard.

Huysmans launched his literary career as a dedicated follower of
Zola. His earliest works revel with appalled exactitude on the most
sordid aspects of urban life, beginning in 1876 with Marthe, a seamy portrait of a streetwalker. In 1882, he published his first masterpiece
in this vein, the novella A Vaul'Eau ("Downstream"). This
is the story of Jean Folantin, an underpaid clerk whose whole object in
life is to find a digestible, and affordable, meal somewhere, anywhere,
in Paris. Already here we sense Huysmans chafing against the strictures
of Naturalism; in this little epic of indigestion, the sleazy begins to
take on a life of its own. The first symptoms of that love of excess
which typifies the later Huysmans start to show; the prose almost oozes,
like one of those vile and bubbling sauces slathered over poor
Folantin's gristly entrecote. As Baldick notes, by this time
Huysmans had become disillusioned with Zola's methods; Naturalism
had proved an impasse. With hindsight, however, we realize that it was
not simply Naturalism, but matter itself, the physical world, and in
particular the body, which both baffled Huysmans and inspired him. He
would beat against its obduracy to the end.

One of his tactics in this battle--and it is one which unites his
disparate works from the first to the last and gives them an unlikely
coherence--entailed discovering the most extreme physical analogue for
the spiritual. This is already apparent in his gruesome depictions of
suffering flesh, a favorite subject, but it applied to other, more
intimate matters as well. Thus, in describing his "conversion"
Huysmans always maintained that it had been a slob; natural, almost
ruminative process; there had been no flash of insight, let alone any
road to Damascus. He claimed that in fact it was akin to the process of
digestion (another cherished theme). And he played on such analogues as
his own devotional practices intensified, calling the sacrament of
confession a "delousing of the soul." This lifelong
preoccupation with the mutinous body and its manifold ills obsessed Huysmans and he documented it, often with ferocious humor, in his
fiction. In this respect, he might be termed the most dogged chronicler
of the Incarnation; it was his nagging fascination with the flesh that
led him to Christ, the embodied God.

A Rebours ("Against the Grain" or "Against
Nature") appeared in 1884 and introduced the fastidious Jean des
Esseintes, the last stunted scion of the ancient Floressas des Esseintes
line, to a bemused public (who made it a bestseller). A Rebours has
always been Huysmans' most popular novel, and it's probably
his best. In des Esseintes, Huysmans found the perfect fulcrum upon
which the competing claims of the spirit and the senses could be poised.
Contrary to first impressions, though he is a supreme aesthete, des
Esseintes is not really a hedonist; pain is as essential to him as
pleasure, it is the freshness of sensation that intrigues him. Des
Esseintes is a logician of the senses, advancing corporeal hypotheses
and fleshly premises to find where they may lead, though
inevitably--whether through his "taste organ" which uses rare
liqueurs to play symphonies on his palate or through the desiccated prose of late Latin authors or through rough-and-tumble foreplay with
the acrobat "Miss Urania" ("an American girl with a
supple figure, sinewy legs, muscles of steel, and arms of
iron")--his conclusions turn to ash. One by one, des Esseintes puts
each sense to the test and finds it wanting, however fantastically
primed or stimulated.

No wonder Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly--not a great admirer of
Huysmans--could repeat to him a remark he had once made to Baudelaire
after the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal: "It remains for you
only to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the
Cross." And he added, "Bandelaire chose the foot of the Cross.
But will the author of A Rebours make the same choice?" A Rebours
ends with a prayer, as though Huysmans, through des Esseintes, were
already half-conscious of what others, even at the time, saw plainly
enough. With senses and imagination exhausted, des Esseintes (in
Baldick's translation) implores, "Lord, take pity on the
Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the
galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a
firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient
hope!"

It was also with A Rebours that Huysmans first displayed his
remarkable prose style, that outlandish amalgam in which exactitude of
phrase consorts with outrageous excess. This is no longer the stately
French of the Academy but a wholly idiosyncratic melange, at once
vituperative, sumptuous, and strangely caressing. This inimitable style,
which his one-time friend Leon Bloy described as "continually
dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten
staircase of terrified Syntax" shows to good effect in his
celebrated description of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald
(c. 1480-1528). Huysmans had seen the triptych in Colmar and in his 1891
novel La-bas, he evoked Grunewald's vision of the crucified Christ:

Christ's arms, dislocated, practically ripped
from his shoulders, seemed throttled along
their entire length by the coiled thongs of the
muscles. The gaping armpits cracked; the
wide-spread hands brandished gaunt fingers
which still persisted in blessing in a mingled
gesticulation of prayer and reproach. The pectoral
muscles quivered, buttery with sweat.
The torso was streaked with circular stave-ends
where the ribs showed through the ribcage.
The flesh swelled, bluish and rotting,
spattered with flea-bites, speckled by pinpricks
from the tips of the flails which had
snapped against the skin but still, here and
there, had studded it with splinters. Purulence
was beginning; the draining gash in the side
streamed sluggishly, drenching the thigh with
blood like some thickened blackberry juice; a
milky pinkish discharge, like a gray Moselle
wine, seeped from the chest and spattered the
belly beneath which the grimy loin-cloth
rippled.

Though Huysman had always cultivated an exuberant relish for wounds
and lesions and suppurations, here he surpassed himself (and I've
translated only a snippet--the passage continues for almost three
pages), but his ghoulish pleasure in depicting the insults of the flesh
had, almost in spite of himself, a deeper purpose. In one sense, he
seems to be competing with his model, as though prose could rival oil in
its tints and shades. But then, after dwelling with macabre affection on
every pustule of the dying Christ, he remarks:

This was the Christ of the Poor, He who had
taken His place among the most wretched of
those whom He had come to redeem, among
the outcasts and the scroungers, among all
those upon whose hideousness or destitution
man's cravenness fixes. This was also the most
human Christ, a weak and sad-fleshed Christ,
deserted by the Father who intervened only
when no fresh torment was conceivable; the
Christ attended only by his Mother--helpless
then, and useless--to whom, like all those
who are tortured, He nanst have cried with
the screams of a child.

La-bas deals with satanic cults and Black Masses, but this passage
clearly prefigures the later Huysmans who made a fervent cult of the
Mater Dolorosa and who denounced "the Christ of the rich" that
prettified "Galilean Adonis." It also reveals his compassion.
Like many fin-de-siecle French Catholics, Huysmans had a penchant for
invective which he indulged at every turn; even later, after his
conversion, he could deride "the canticle-braying hordes" of
Lourdes. When the censorious Charles Peguy was admonished with the verse
"Judge not lest ye be judged," he shot back,

"I don't judge, I condemn" and Huysmans would have
concurred. And yet, again like Peguy but unlike Bloy (whom Baldick
unmasks as not only a self-righteous hypocrite but also the most
shameless of spongers), Huysmans's words were often harsh while his
actions were kind.

Huysmans's last three novels (all featuring his alter ego
Durtal, first introduced in La-bas) constitute his "spiritual
autobiography." With the possible exception of En route of 1895,
neither La Cathedrale (1898) nor L'Oblat (1903) is much read today
(the most recent translations into English all date from the 1920s). But
Baldick draws on them with tact and delicacy to reconstruct
Huysmans' inner life; they contain "the story of a soul"
and in that sense are perhaps more precious than mere novels can be.

If "the style is the man" then Huysmans's own prose
style seems rife with prescience. In 1901, he published Sainte Lydwyne
de Schiedam, a gruesome study of the fourteenth-century Dutch martyr, in
which no detail of her horrific afflictions was left to the imagination.
As Baldick points out, it was to be Huysmans's own final statement
on human suffering. Blessed Lydwyne had been an early exponent of
"mystical substitution," and this sparked Huysmans's
interest. In his view, Christ had undergone a mystical marriage with
suffering, personified as a bride, on the Mount of Olives; in this union
He had offered up his own agonies for the redemption of others. Huysmans
came to accept this doctrine as the only plausible explanation for the
unmerited sufferings of the innocent. He would put the doctrine into
practice in his own flesh.

Diagnosed with a malignancy which ate away his mouth and lips and
palate, Huysmans suffered the pain and the stench of his own
decomposition with uncomplaining fortitude. When his doctor offered him
morphine, he exclaimed, "All, you want to prevent me from suffering
... I forbid you!" And towards the end he remarked, "I am the
total of a sum. Who knows whether I am not expiating the sins of
others?" His death, on the evening of May 12, 1907, was what
Catholics used to call "a good death." A good death was not a
painless one but a death welcomed in the hope of salvation.

The devil seems to have deserted Huysmans in his final months.
Perhaps he had served his purpose. Huysmans's preoccupation with
Satan and the daft protocols of the occult strikes us as somewhat
quaint. But this may be to miss a crucial point. For Huysmans the
supernatural was a kind of spectrum, with cruder wavelengths in the form
of hobgoblins and "ecclesiastical larvae" at one extreme, and
ever more refined pulsations, leading ultimately to God, at the other.
To accept even the least of these was to set one foot on the lintel of
belief. It may have taken a swat from that hooked paw, but, once
embarked, Huysmans never looked back.

(1) The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, by Robert Baldick; Dedalus, 592
pages, $23.

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